Reason Magazine - Staff

Tough Choice

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 EDT

When Michigan's Gov. John Engler came out swinging against a state school-choice ballot initiative last year, he attracted national attention. Here was a reform- minded Republican bucking one of his party's few meaningful public-policy ideas. For 10 years, Engler has cut taxes, slashed welfare, and held state spending in check. Private-school choice seems a natural addition to this portfolio, and most observers assumed that the governor would support the school-choice referendum, which would allow some students at failing schools to use tax dollars to pay for private schools. Last September, however, Engler said that because of unfavorable polls, school choice in Michigan "has no hope." Since then he has actually worked to undermine the measure.

Engler's actions were an early sign that school choice could play a major role in this year's presidential election. Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bradley spent much of the Democratic primary season bickering over which of them hated school choice more. George W. Bush and John McCain also tussled with the issue. Bush has proposed awarding $1,500 vouchers to kids in the country's worst schools; McCain is likewise a school-choice booster, though he never outlined a specific plan. In the one non-presidential race that threatens to eclipse all others--Rudy vs. Hillary in New York--school choice is perhaps the candidates' sharpest policy difference. Giuliani has clamored on behalf of school choice for years, while the First Lady, with her teacher-union talking points in hand, apparently believes it's part of a vast conspiracy to destroy public education.

Every election cycle has its themes--the recession in 1992, the Clintons' health-care takeover in 1994, protecting federal entitlements in 1996, a stained blue dress in 1998. School choice has never risen to that level, even though the idea has been around for decades. Milton Friedman proposed that the government pay for education, but not dictate exactly where children receive their schooling, in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. That provocative suggestion, however, didn't attract much notice outside right-wing cliques until the late 1980s.

Wisconsin passed a school-choice law limited to Milwaukee in 1990, Ohio adopted a program for Cleveland in 1995, and Florida approved a statewide plan last year (struck down in March by a state court). Otherwise, school choice has flopped politically. Congress has essentially ignored the matter, except to pass school choice for kids in the District of Columbia. President Clinton vetoed it. School choice seemed ready for prime time for most of the 1990s, but it hasn't yet gotten a national airing.

Michigan could start to change that. In January, supporters of the "Kids First! Yes!" initiative announced that they had gathered well beyond the nearly 303,000 signatures needed to put a question on the November ballot. The effort is also well funded--it raised more than $1 million in 1999 and hopes to bring in $5 million this year. The teacher unions will no doubt pour cash into their own campaign, but $5 million at least guarantees a pro-school choice message will be heard.

Much of the measure's financial muscle comes from people tied to Amway, which is based near Grand Rapids. Co-founder Richard DeVos and his wife Helen each gave $150,000 to the effort. Amway President Dick DeVos (their son) contributed $50,000. Elsa Prince, the mother of Dick's wife Betsy, sent in $200,000. There's heavy Catholic backing as well. The Detroit archdiocese put in $100,000, the Michigan Catholic Conference provided $25,000, and Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monahan, who plans to spend the rest of his life donating his fortune to Catholic causes, ponied up $100,000.

Michigan, as always, promises to be a vital national electoral battleground. Presidential candidates descending on the Wolverine State will be asked to announce their positions on the state's initiative. The next commander-in-chief might claim a school-choice mandate--either to promote it or to suppress it on the federal level. The coming battle in Michigan could well be a turning point for the whole movement.

That may not be good news. There is a strong chance the initiative will lose. But even if it passes, supporters could find themselves wondering why they fought so hard for so little.

Engler has a point about the politics. The school-choice polls in Michigan don't look promising. A Detroit News survey in September had the initiative leading 47 percent to 43 percent. Another one in January showed some improvement; school choice was ahead 53 percent to 23 percent, with 24 percent undecided. This is an uptick, but a weak showing overall. Support for ballot initiatives typically erodes over time. Their popularity tends to peak early, and then opponents identify particular problems with the way they are written. Those problems get voters thinking that while they may like the idea of an initiative in general, they may not like this particular proposal. To pass, initiatives generally need to begin a campaign with support in the 60 percent to 70 percent range. The most recent Detroit News poll, however, found those in favor of school choice dropping to just 42 percent after hearing a few arguments against the initiative--i.e., the sorts of things they'll hear from teacher-union ads in the fall.

A loss on school choice could affect other races, and perhaps in ways that school-choice supporters may not like. Although choice typically polls well across parties, almost all the muscle for it in Michigan comes from Republicans. (Indeed, that's why Engler's position is so newsworthy.) A Lansing polling firm has said that the initiative is likely to increase Republican voter turnout by 5 percent and Democratic turnout by 10 percent. It's likely that some of these Democrats--especially urban blacks, who in many ways have the most to gain from school choice --will vote in favor of the initiative. But that's far from certain.

More important to Engler's calculus, they probably won't go for a straight GOP ticket. Their presence would hurt Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham, who faces one of the toughest re-election races in the country against Democratic Rep. Debbie Stabenow. His loss would mean one less vote in the Senate for everything from a federal school-choice plan to education-savings accounts. And, on the eve of congressional redistricting, the GOP holds the governorship and state Senate, but maintains only a narrow lead in the state House of Representatives. A disastrous school- choice outing could cost a state Senate seat and make it impossible to redistrict House Minority Whip David Bonior out of office.

If the presidential race is close, too, a few votes in Michigan could make a big difference, sending 18 electoral votes toward Al Gore, a presidential candidate who is resolutely anti-school choice on every level except the personal (Gore's children have all attended exclusive private schools).

Then there's the problem with winning. The initiative provides a voucher worth about $3,100--half of per-student public-school expenditures--to children in school districts that graduate fewer than two-thirds of their students. The money is certainly enough to cover all or most of tuition costs at most private schools. But the great majority of school districts graduate more than two-thirds of their students. Something like 30 of Michigan's 560 school districts would be covered. And Detroit--the grand prize of state school reform--might not be touched at all. Initiative supporters say that the Detroit district would have to allow choice, but others are less sure. The city's most recent reported graduation rate is 83 percent, although this is currently under review by the state education department. The initiative does allow other school districts to adopt choice following a vote of the school board or voters, but these small-scale local efforts would likely find themselves overwhelmed by the vast resources of the teacher unions.

The initiative language itself is problematic. It would require that the legislature "provide for regular testing of the knowledge in academic subjects" for all teachers in schools accepting vouchers. Here is the Achilles heel of the whole voucher effort, in Michigan and elsewhere: the prospect that new regulations will interfere with how private schools conduct themselves. One of the strengths of private schools, of course, is that they do not have to abide by the same rules as their public counterparts. If vouchers introduce new regulations--and we're not talking fire codes here--private schools begin to become quasi-public. Rather than leading to a deregulation of public schools, choice could lead to the regulation of private ones. This is one reason why the Association of Independent Michigan Schools hasn't endorsed the initiative.

To be sure, teacher testing is a long way from making nuns at Catholic schools hand out condoms, but libertarians know slippery slopes when they see them. Government control almost always follows government money. "We wouldn't want to open that door a crack," Ken Seward, head of Birmingham's prestigious Roeper School, told the Detroit Free Press in March.

Perhaps most important, it's not as if school reform is dead in Michigan, even without private-school choice. Hard-core choice advocates complain that Engler never has been much of a friend, telling activists with each new election cycle that the timing for school choice just isn't right. But, in fact, Engler has dramatically expanded school choice in Michigan--public school choice. Thanks largely to him, students can move freely within districts and even attend schools in adjoining ones. There are some 170 charter schools now open for business, and they enroll about 50,000 kids. Engler is currently working to create more, and the only thing stopping him is a handful of dissident Republicans who have joined a unified Democratic front in opposing this variety of school choice. It could be argued that spending a portion of the money earmarked for the initiative to defeat these politicians might do more than a quixotic referendum to expand parent and student options or even offering private scholarships to poor kids as an act of philanthropy.

It's tempting to support the Michigan drive simply because of the people who oppose it. Last September, children at an elementary school in Rochester Hills were given anti-school choice flyers to take home to their parents. The flyers tendentiously labeled school choice a racist plot "to avoid desegregation" (in the 1950s) and even took a shot at Milton Friedman, whom they weirdly described as "best known to the world as the former economics advisor to Augusto Pinochet, the fascist dictator of Chile." Forget the Nobel Prize; meet Milton Friedman, crypto-Nazi.

But that really isn't good enough. California's 1993 school choice initiative, which lost by a 2-to-1 margin, saw ordinary Republican voters, along with virtually everyone else except for inner-city residents of all races, opposing the measure for an obvious reason: They were basically satisfied with their schools. Surveys show that parents tend to think other people's schools are a mess, but that the ones their kids attend are okay.

Opponents of the California initiative ran a "conservative" campaign against it, raising budgetary concerns, suggesting there was no problem to fix, and even hiring Republican operatives to craft these messages. Republican Gov. Pete Wilson came out against the proposition fairly late in the campaign; the biggest difference in Michigan may be that Engler has come out early. In March, he teamed up with state Democrats to pass a budget bill that warns public schools may lose some funding if voters approve the school-choice initiative. That's a gift for the teacher unions' fall campaign.

Engler makes a final point worth considering: It's still far from certain the Supreme Court will uphold school choice. Cleveland and Florida's programs are currently in litigation, and one of them will probably wind up before the Court in the next two years or so. Given the Court's current composition, odds are that the program will be upheld. But why should Michigan lay out $5 million now, as opposed to a couple of years from now, when the question of constitutionality is more settled? In fact, there may be a new justice on the court by then, appointed by President Gore. Another reason--and perhaps a decisive one--for Engler to make sure Michigan winds up in the GOP column in November. School choice just may be too important to run on this year.

King of the Jungle

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Sun, 01 Aug 1999 00:00:00 EDT

Conrol Freaks

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 EDT

Last October "administration officials" boasted to The New York Times that history would recognize technology transfers to China "as one of Clinton's most lasting legacies." They suggested that these exports improved national security by aiding the economy, ensuring the United States would keep its place as the planet's single superpower.

Republicans howled. Allowing China to purchase equipment that upgraded its military prowess, they complained, had precisely the opposite effect. Technology transfers indeed may be one of Clinton's "most lasting legacies," but they sure aren't anything to brag about. And now the top-secret report compiled by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and the Select House Committee on Technology Transfers to China is almost ready for declassification. When it becomes public, the White House is expected to take a few hard punches.

The effect has been to cow Clinton. Today, he is reluctant to do the one thing that ought to be a prerequisite for his aides' proud legacy claims. American computer manufacturers and their technological advances are on a collision course with Department of Commerce export controls. Industry officials say that without a fix, they will lose the opportunity to sell tens of thousands of mass-market machines by the end of this year. Even Cox has signaled that his forthcoming report shouldn't stymie free trade. "The committee found that the current export-licensing process is riddled with errors and plagued by delays [and hurts] America's competitiveness in world markets," he wrote in the San Jose Mercury-News on March 28. Yet the Clinton administration has made no attempt to modernize the rules governing American participation in the international computer trade.

Current regulations make it a hassle to sell a personal computer with just two Pentium III chips to a buyer in Beijing. Although this is basic Web-enabling equipment, the Department of Commerce prevents easy shipment of these machines to countries considered proliferation risks.

Even strong supporters of free trade can support the logic of restrictions. Nobody wants rogue states or bomb-building terrorists to get their hands on high-tech devices. If security crimps sales, so be it. Powerful computers built by IBM and Silicon Graphics already have found their way into two of Russia's top nuclear weapons labs. China returned a Sun Microsystems machine last year after U.S. officials discovered that it had been moved from the research facility that supposedly bought it to a military outpost far away.

Yet export control rules written just three years ago are rapidly becoming obsolete. In the 1980s, it took a multi-million-dollar supercomputer to do the complex calculations needed to operate a ballistic missile system. Today, a desktop computer running at 450 megahertz is as powerful as the machines used to design America's nuclear weapons. Within a year, Pentium III chips are expected to blaze at speeds of up to 800 megahertz. Under current rules, manufacturers will have to obtain a special export permit from the Commerce Department for every computer containing just one of them before it can be sold to a user in one of the countries deemed a national security hazard.

This red tape does little to make the United States safer. Virtually anybody can purchase computers powerful enough to run a nuclear arsenal. What's more, new developments in hardware and software have made it possible to create clusters of relatively weak machines whose combined energies approach the might of a supercomputer. If legitimate Chinese businesses cannot buy ordinary machines made in America because of licensing delays or outright bans, they will quickly turn to foreign competitors. The biggest beneficiaries of strict import controls in the United States are companies such as Acer (based in Taiwan), Fujitsu (Japan), Legend (Hong Kong), NEC (Japan), Samsung (Korea), and Siemens Nixdorf (Germany) to name just a few.

With foreign sales blocked, American companies will be denied an important source of revenue. According to industry figures, two-thirds of all computers with more than one processor were sold outside the United States last year. Worldwide sales are projected to double by 2002 to nearly 6 million units. Again, about two-thirds of those are expected to be sold abroad.

So harsh import controls would set back American companies without improving national security. They could also hurt international pro-democracy movements. During the 1980s, resistance movements behind the Iron Curtain kept in touch with each other and the outside world by using fax machines, copiers, and primitive computers.

Today, China is trying to squash simi-lar trends within its own borders. Police departments are assigning agents to wander the Internet in search of troublemak-ers among China's Web users, estimated to number more than 2 million at the end of last year. In December, President Jiang Zemin threatened computer programmers (plus artists and writers) with stiff penalties if they dared to "endanger social order."

One month later, the government made good on its warning. After detaining software designer Lin Hai for eight months without charges, it sentenced him to two years in prison for selling 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses to a D.C.-based electronic newsletter for political dissidents. Lin's computers were confiscated, and he was convicted of "inciting the overthrow of state power" by aiding a "hostile foreign organization." There is hardly a better example of how the computer trade actually exports freedom to countries that don't have enough of it.

To monitor computer exports, the U.S. government has created a special measurement that combines speed and power: Mtops, or millions of theoretical operations per second. Exports to American allies--so-called tier 1 countries, such as the Western European nations, Canada, Japan, Mexico, and Australia--face no special licensing requirements. Tier 2 countries (there are 106 of them in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America) encounter restrictions only for machines running at 10,000 Mtops--still rather advanced by today's standards. Exports are flatly prohibited to tier 4 countries, such as Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria.

Tier 3 countries are the most problematic--and controversial. Their ranks include China, India, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia. Computers that perform at more than 2,000 Mtops can expect export delays. Those running at 7,000 Mtops are banned outright. When these thresholds were created in 1996, they represented fairly futuristic devices. Today, however, ordinary business machines are starting to surpass them.

Determining Mtops thresholds is tricky, if not arbitrary. "It's useful to think of a pyramid," explains Dan Hoydysh of Unisys. "You have to control the export of high-performance computers at the top and release mass-market machines at the bottom. The problem is the bottom keeps getting more sophisticated." A report by the General Accounting Office last September said computers operating at "over 2,000 Mtops are not readily available to tier 3 countries from foreign sources without restrictions." Yet that conclusion may already be out of date--or at least it looks like it could be by this October.

The process for raising the thresholds is simple enough and doesn't even require legislative action. The administration must notify Congress of its intentions and submit a report that explains its reasoning. Then, 180 days later, the new standards take effect. Because computer companies are worried about sales this fall, the administration should have set the clock ticking in late March or early April. So far, however, there have been no announcements.

The White House has been reluctant to address this matter because it worries Congress won't sit still. China is a major vulnerability for the Clinton administration. From the 1996 campaign finance scandals to the latest spy revelations from Los Alamos, the Democrats don't have much political capital to burn if Republicans start pointing fingers. The White House would prefer to have computer companies lobby Congress for a few months, meet privately with congressional leaders sometime this summer, and beat this fall's deadline by quietly agreeing to ignore the 180-day waiting period.

Yet this would merely solve a short-term problem and put off another reckoning. Technology will begin to push against a new set of Mtops thresholds before long. A better idea is to scrap the current regulations and adopt a relative standard that forbids the export of any supercomputer--defined as one of the 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 most powerful machines in use at any given moment. This solution would represent a permanent fix that allows American companies to sell mass-market products but also forbids the latest technology from reaching the hands of Kim II Sung in North Korea.

What the country most needs, however, is a noisy debate over the interplay of technology, trade, and national security. The United States lives in a world made more dangerous by technology. At best, unilateral export controls will only slow the rate at which potential enemies can acquire powerful computers. At worst, they will deny American companies an important source of revenue without also improving Americans' safety.

The Chinese government will ultimately get the computers it wants, and there's little the U.S. government can do to stop it. Better to think about how to deal with those systems once they're in place--by building an anti-ballistic-missile system, for example. Rather than deny the inevitable, we should prepare for it.

Rebirth of Cool Cal

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 EST

Coolidge: An American Enigma, by Robert Sobel,

Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 462 pages, $34.95

The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge, by Robert H. Ferrell,

Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 244 pages, $29.95

Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents, by Nathan Miller, New York: Scribner, 272 pages, $23.00

"I believe I can swing it," deadpanned Calvin Coolidge 75 years ago, on the night that he was sworn in as president, following the sudden death of Warren Harding. Since then, however, most historians have frowned on the Republican. Several times over the last half-century, the father-son duo Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Jr. have asked their fellow professors to rank America's chief executives. These academics always deem Coolidge "below average"--in other words, they think he's about as accomplished as the dithering Millard Fillmore. Cool Cal didn't do much better in a 1982 Chicago Tribune poll of 49 "distinguished historians"; they placed him immediately behind Jimmy Carter. In the 1997 Ridings-McIver survey of historians and former politicians, Coolidge came in at number 33, right below Richard Nixon.

The man deserves better. He is America's most underappreciated president, a tax-cutting, budget-slashing politician whose very name became synonymous with the fast-growing 1920s economy: "Coolidge Prosperity," they called it. Coolidge stood defiantly as an anti-Progressive between two activist eras, the first led by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the second by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That's the real reason so many modern academics dislike him: Coolidge didn't participate in the onward march of an ever-growing government. In fact, he actively resisted it. "The people cannot look to legislation generally for success," he said in one of his most famous speeches. "Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act of resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil."

It's an anachronism to call Coolidge America's first libertarian president; it's also not an apt label for a politician who favored trade barriers and cut immigration levels. But perhaps this Republican comes close enough for government work. He's certainly the kind of leader the United States could use today. And now, after decades of taking partisan political knocks from New Deal court historians such as the Schlesingers, he has started to receive a much-needed reassessment in two important and level-headed books, Robert Sobel's Coolidge: An American Enigma and Robert H. Ferrell's The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Sobel offers a traditional biography of an often inscrutable man; Ferrell focuses almost exclusively on Coolidge's presidential administration. Both efforts are welcome.

The Coolidge years marked a transitional time for the United States, with technological advances improving the lives of ordinary citizens in dramatic ways. While he was president, automobile registrations tripled and phone ownership grew rapidly. The first suburbs appeared, and skyscrapers began to dot the urban landscape. Motion pictures suddenly played sound; they became known as the "talkies," and theater attendance skyrocketed. Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean, exciting imaginations everywhere.

Coolidge himself seemed to stand on the cusp of the modern era, a mixture of old and new. He was the last president who never flew in an airplane. He didn't own a car until he left office, and even then he didn't drive it. Yet he was a radio pioneer. The new medium--it broadcast a political convention for the first time in 1924, when Coolidge was renominated by the GOP--allowed him to overcome his lifelong handicap as a crummy stump speaker. ("McCall could fill any hall in Massachusetts and Coolidge could empty it," wrote one critic, referring to Coolidge's candidacy for lieutenant governor and his ticket mate, Samuel McCall, in 1916.) His reedy voice, in fact, was ideal for the airwaves; he delivered 16 radio addresses in five years.

Although he instinctively recoiled from the glad-handing that most successful politicians thrive on--no fraternity at Amherst College would accept him when he first rushed--Coolidge embodied a very genuine kind of populism that the age of electronic media would soon destroy. He was, for example, the last president to write his own speeches or spend a significant amount of time in the traditional activity of greeting anonymous White House visitors and passers-by with a quick handshake. He was also the first president to hold regular press conferences with newspaper reporters, although he insisted that most of these meetings be off the record.

Instead of trying to tinker with the economy or control emerging industries with new rules of conduct, Coolidge had the basic good sense to leave well enough alone. "It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones," he said early in his career, and these words animated much of his public life, especially his presidency. One of his important achievements was helping defeat a popular crop subsidy bill which would have encouraged farmers to increase production and demand more government support in an escalating spiral of dependency. Coolidge mocked social engineers--including his own commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, who would succeed him in 1929--as "world beaters" and "wonder boys."

Between 1923 and 1928, Coolidge's first year and last full year in office, he accomplished a feat that seems unbelievable at the end of the century: Federal spending didn't increase. It remained steady at $3.3 billion, even though military expenditures rose slightly. "The Coolidge era was a time of small government, evident in the nearly complete lack of federal social programs," writes Ferrell. Furthermore, regulation "was thin to the point of invisibility." The number of federal employees crept upward from 537,000 to 561,000 under Coolidge's watch, but most of this hiring was by the Post Office, which was trying to keep up with a growing population. Among Washington bureaucrats, the federal payroll actually dropped from 70,000 to 65,000.

Coolidge managed to cut taxes several times and in several ways. He was especially eager to reduce the income tax burden on top earners, in the belief that freeing their capital for investment would help ordinary workers. He didn't call it "trickle-down economics," but that's what he meant. He also thought a stronger national economy propelled by reduced taxes would help the government's bottom line. "I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward," he said in his 1924 State of the Union address. Congress always fought him on the cuts, but Coolidge successfully pushed for a series of reductions. Government receipts stayed even at $3.9 billion during his tenure, bearing out his belief that higher tax rates do not necessarily generate higher revenue.

This doesn't mean that today's supply-siders should claim Coolidge as an early member of their club. He was a fierce budget hawk who consistently used revenue surpluses to pay down the national debt, which mushroomed during World War I. "While I am exceedingly interested in having tax reduction," he said in 1927, "it can only be brought about as a result of economy, and therefore it seems to me that the Chamber of Commerce and all others that are interested in tax reduction ought to be first of all bending their energies to see that no unwise expenditures are authorized by the government, and that every possible effort is put forth to keep our expenditures down, and pay off our debt, so that we can have tax reduction."

As much as Coolidge disliked high taxes, he considered a large national debt an even greater evil. Retiring it was "the predominant necessity of the country," he said, "the very largest internal improvement... possible to conceive." During his presidency, the debt shrank more than 20 percent, from $22.3 billion to $17.6 billion.

This animus toward debt grew out of Coolidge's personal frugality, which was legendary. When enemies tried to smear Coolidge by linking him to the Harding administration's corrupt Teapot Dome scheme, the simple and obvious fact that he didn't live in high style served as a ready witness. Early in his career, Coolidge refused to accept a salary higher than the one his office received on election day. He didn't own a home until after he was president. For most of his political career he rented a seven-room duplex in Northampton, Massachusetts, moving out of it only when his quasi-celebrity status as an ex-president drove him to seek more privacy. Coolidge wasn't a scrooge; he just believed in living honestly and within his means. When a cosmetics company approached the former president about having his wife, Grace, give an endorsement for a large sum, Coolidge wrote back, Sorry, she doesn't use your product. The novelist Charles McCarry tells an old family story about Coolidge as ex-president. On a summer day, Coolidge borrowed a match from McCarry's grandfather in Northampton. That fall, they bumped into each other again on Main Street. Coolidge said, "Hello, Will, here's the match I owe you," and handed a brand-new kitchen match to an astonished recipient.

Coolidge learned these virtues growing up in the remote hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Two presidents have died on Independence Day (Adams and Jefferson), but Coolidge is the only one to have been born on it: July 4, 1872. His storekeeping father sacrificed much to put his single son through Black River Academy and Amherst College, and then to send remittances as Coolidge studied for the bar and set up his law office in Northampton. Sobel reports that Coolidge even received this financial assistance at the age of 34, following his marriage and the birth of his first son--something that must have gnawed at the man who once remarked, "Anybody who is not capable of supporting himself is not fit for self-government."

Coolidge won 19 of 20 races for public office, starting with an 1898 campaign
for the Northampton City Council. He worked his way up the political ladder in Massachusetts with a striking deliberateness, moving first into the state legislature, next heading the state senate, then becoming lieutenant governor, and finally rising to governor. Like many Republicans during these years, Coolidge was something of a Progressive, supporting minimum wage laws, a six-day work week, women's suffrage, and the direct election of senators. Part of this was sincere --few political figures were immune to the Progressive bug in the first part of the century--but much of it also grew from Coolidge's impulse to win broad constituencies. Before there were Reagan Democrats, notes Sobel, there were Coolidge Democrats. Moreover, Coolidge wanted to repair the breach in the GOP that erupted in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt bolted the party and helped Woodrow Wilson win an election with only a plurality of the vote.

Coolidge had stuck with the doomed incumbent, President William Howard Taft, but held no grudges. He could mix with Progressives and occasionally might even govern like one. At bottom, however, he was the last Republican president to hark back to the party's pre-Progressive roots in any significant way. All his life Coolidge was a consummate party builder, even reaching across racial lines when it wasn't a popular thing to do: In an unusual political decision for a president in 1924, he gave the commencement address to the all-black Howard University.

In 1920, the GOP tapped Gov. Coolidge to run for vice president alongside Ohio Sen. Warren Harding. Coolidge had risen to national prominence a year earlier for his handling of a police strike in Boston, when he forthrightly supported firing the strikers. "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime," he declared, in words that made him almost a household name. The Harding-Coolidge ticket went on to beat Democrats James Cox and FDR. Wags called the 1920 race a "kangaroo election" because the hind legs (vice presidential candidates Coolidge and Roosevelt) were stronger than the front ones.

Coolidge was a serendipitous choice. Republican Party bosses probably would have dumped him for another candidate in 1924 (a common practice at the time). Instead, he became an accidental president and then easily won an election in his own right. (He would have coasted to victory again in 1928, but decided to retire instead.) As a man of uncommon moral character, Coolidge appeared on the national scene at precisely the right moment. The ethics of his immediate predecessor, Warren Harding, are best described as Clintonesque: a reckless personal life compounded by a bevy of home-state friends who conspired to enrich themselves at public expense. Harding was enormously popular when he died, but postmortem revelations about his personal life and the behavior of his political appointees might have done lasting damage to the office of the presidency if it hadn't been for Coolidge's confident and careful leadership.

Despite all of this, Nathan Miller ranks Coolidge the seventh-worst president in his entertaining but unreliable book Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents. His chief allegation against Coolidge is that he "did less work than any other American president in history"--i.e., he didn't create some big government program as his legacy. He also accuses Coolidge of not preventing the Depression, which would strike less than a year after he left office. There's some fairness to this charge--in 1928, Coolidge made the unfortunate statement that he "wouldn't happen to know anything about" how the Federal Reserve Board sets interest rates--but quite a bit of unfairness, too. Economic historians today still aren't entirely sure what caused the Depression and what might have been done to prevent it. Why must Coolidge shoulder the blame for not predicting what the so-called experts still can't figure out nearly 70 years later?

But Miller's errors are even more egregious. He denigrates Coolidge as a man who did not possess "a wide-ranging mind," but several pages later acknowledges that Coolidge translated Dante's Inferno into English. It makes one wonder how Miller spends his own free time. Certainly not studying Coolidge's own writings and speeches: Miller misquotes one of his target's best-known remarks, recasting the statement "The chief business of the American people is business" as "The business of America is business." He seems entirely ignorant of what the speech was really about--the importance of a free press--and totally unaware of the moral context in which Coolidge framed his remarks. In the same talk, he said: "It is only those who do not understand our people, who believe our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things we want much more," including peace, honor, charity, and idealism. Miller's scholarly sloppiness is inexcusable, but hardly uncommon. As Thomas Silver revealed in his 1982 book Coolidge and the Historians, the 30th president has received fundamentally unfair treatment almost from the day he left office.

Historian Richard Norton Smith says presidents who are rated as outstanding tend to be those who supplied great conflict and drama; whether they actually advanced the interests of their country is a secondary concern. The famously quiet Coolidge certainly wasn't a dramatic figure. He had none of the delusions of grandeur that have afflicted so many other presidents, and may have been the humblest person ever to occupy the office. He performed his job sensibly and well. A neighbor once remarked that "Calvin never takes a chance and strikes out, and never hits a home run. A base hit is his limit. He'll make that every time." But like a shortstop who hits .300, always puts the ball in play, and doesn't make many errors, he's a valuable veteran, if often overlooked.

When Coolidge died in 1933, some of his severest critics reflected on his time in office with a fondness they didn't have for him when he served. The poison-penned H.L. Mencken wrote these generous words: "He begins to seem, in retrospect, an extremely comfortable and even praiseworthy citizen. His failings are forgotten; the country remembers only the grateful fact that he let it alone. Well, there are worse epitaphs for a statesman. If the day ever comes when Jefferson's warnings are heeded at last, and we reduce government to its simplest terms, it may very well happen that Cal's bones now resting inconspicuously in the Vermont granite will come to be revered as those of a man who really did the nation some service." The new books by Sobel and Ferrell should encourage the sort of re-evaluation that Mencken had in mind. It's about time.

The Politics of Permanent Immigration

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Thu, 01 Oct 1998 00:00:00 EDT

At a December meeting with Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson, a group of trade association executives ran through their legislative priorities for 1998. Tort reform, regulatory relief, and tax credits for research and development topped their agenda--just as they always do. The RNC chief promised that the GOP would do what it could--just as he always does. The gathering could have occurred at any time during the last several years, and its content would not have been very different. It was another typically dull Washington roundtable discussion about how the federal government can help American business.

Right before the meeting ended, however, Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spoke up. "There's one more thing," he said. "If the economy keeps growing the way it has, we're going to run out of people." He predicted a severe labor shortage sometime in the next decade. Suddenly the room jumped to life. Josten's colleagues backed him up. Within five or 10 years, the group thought, there will be many more new jobs than people able to fill them. The country already is nearing full employment: The unemployment rate dropped to 4.3 percent in May, the lowest it's been in 28 years. An ominous demographic problem makes for more trouble: There are 22 million fewer Generation Xers than baby boomers. "Unless we find new ways to increase our productivity, we're going to have to bring in more people simply to maintain the economy's growth rate," said Josten. "I'm talking about more legal immigrants at all skill levels."

It's hard to imagine anyone in Washington speaking these words just two and a half years ago, when it looked like congressional Republicans and President Clinton were close to an election-year deal that would have formally reduced legal immigration for the first time since the 1920s. A consensus had started to emerge among the Washington political establishment to scale back on admissions, primarily for economic reasons but also because of cultural concerns, population worries, and environmentalism. The bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, led by the late liberal heroine Barbara Jordan, supported the cuts and was instrumental in building the political momentum. Democrats such as Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.) were looking for a populist cause to use against big business. Conservatives divided deeply and often bitterly on the issue, and it appeared as though much of the movement was ready to jettison Ronald Reagan's legacy of support for newcomers in order to ride a wave started by California's Proposition 187, a successful ballot initiative aimed at discouraging illegal immigration.

Some acted from a deeply held animus toward multiculturalism, which they believed was fueled by immigration, while others simply wanted a winning political issue. Groups long opposed to immigration because it increases population pressures, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, pressed their advantage. In addition to a reduction in numbers, restrictionists appeared on the brink of enacting an array of policies that would have reversed America's history of generous admission levels: income requirements for immigrants trying to gain entry; a ban on the employment of foreign students upon their grad-uation from U.S. colleges; new prevailing wage rules for companies hiring foreign-born workers; and--perhaps most threatening of all from a pro-immigration viewpoint--a provision that would have sunset the current system of admissions
by a certain date and there-by put restrictionists in the political driver's seat. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), an anti-immigration leader, declared: "Business advocates continually give me the babble, `All we want, Simpson, is the best and the brightest.' I say, `Bull! You want the best, brightest, and cheapest, and I for one am going to bust up your playhouse.'"

But Simpson and his friends failed almost entirely, a defeat from which they haven't yet recovered and probably won't for years. Today, the powers that be in Washington are on the verge of actually boosting the number of immigrants entering the United States by 190,000 over five years--an astonishing reversal. More surprises may be in store as the business community starts, however tentatively, to suggest that sustaining America's long economic boom into the next century will require importing more people. The politics of immigration have undergone a stunning sea change. The strong economy has played a key role in this transformation, but perhaps equally important are a series of political developments making it almost unimaginable that immigration levels will suffer even modest reductions in the foreseeable future without a serious economic downturn. The last great wave of immigration, from about 1880 to 1924, brought roughly 25 million people to the United States. The current wave, which picked up steam in the late 1960s, may last much longer than its predecessor.

In analyzing the reasons for this reversal, it's important to start with the realization that immigrants aren't exactly winning popularity contests today. A poll conducted for PBS last summer by Princeton Survey Research Associates found that big majorities of Americans think immigration overburdens the welfare system, causes taxes to rise, hurts job opportunities for the native-born, and fosters racial and ethnic conflict. Oddly, however, more Americans wanted immigration kept at current levels (39 percent) or increased (10 percent) than wanted immigration reduced (36 percent) or stopped altogether (10 percent).

The slight edge in favor of immigration, which falls within the poll's margin of error, may not seem impressive--until you consider where these numbers used to be. In opinion polls taken for more than 50 years, almost always a plurality and often a majority of Americans have wanted immigration levels reduced. In the early 1990s, surveys routinely showed more than 60 percent of the public favoring cuts. Support for lower immigration has dropped 15 to 20 points in just a few years.

The economy explains much of this change. Immigrants' approval ratings, like the scandal-plagued Clinton administration's, benefit from good times. In fact, public desire to reduce immigration always has tracked U.S. economic performance. The loudest calls for cuts in admission tend to come toward the end of recessions, as they did in 1991-92 and 1981-82. Likewise, immigrants get a boost during healthier periods. Today, more people want immigration levels increased or maintained than at any point since 1965, when Congress rewrote immigration law by scrapping the national-origin quota system adopted in the 1920s, created an admissions process based mainly on family reunification, and made the current influx of newcomers possible.

For all the economy has done, however, a series of political events also have played a critical role in reshaping the immigration debate during the last several years. The most important may be one of the least noticed: There is now an effective immigrant lobby in Washington that includes not just groups that support immigration (these always have existed) but also immigrants themselves. At the center of this movement is Rick Swartz, an ex-leftist who is perhaps the foremost pro-immigration political strategist in the country.

Swartz is a rare Washington lobbyist: An activist at heart, he doesn't always follow the money but instead chases down cash to help him finance his own crusades. Immigration always has topped his list of priorities. "It's a quintessentially American issue that cuts across virtually every constituency," says Swartz. "I don't normally quote the Bible, but the Book of Leviticus says it well: `If a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.' Those are compelling words."

Swartz, whose red face and bushy eyebrows lend him a subtly villainous look, is probably the figure most disliked by Washington restrictionists. He has almost no public persona; he doesn't debate on Crossfire or write op-eds for The Wall Street Journal. But his influence is felt everywhere. "He's the Moriarity at the center of the web of high immigration lobbying," says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who is no fan. "He pretty much runs everything."

Swartz got his start as a hard-left civil rights lawyer in the late 1970s; he gradually evolved into an unclassifiable supporter of economic growth and opportunity. He spent several years working closely with local coalitions of ethnic groups composed of post-1965 immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. He quickly recognized the immigrants' almost complete lack of political clout. "They had no voice on Capitol Hill," he explains. "They were going to get slammed every time unless something changed."

Swartz, a consummate coalition builder, founded the National Immigration Forum. In 1982, he strategically merged with the American Immigration and Citizenship Conference, a much older outfit that was made up primarily of white ethnic groups associated with Ellis Island. This assured that the National Immigration Forum couldn't easily be tagged with the charge of representing only new minority groups looking for special favors. It linked the new immigrants--who provided most of the forum's emerging political muscle--to the older ones and argued simply and powerfully that they were the latest representatives of a long national tradition.

Under Swartz's direction, the forum grew in size and strength during the 1980s. This was a significant development because immigrants historically are a disenfranchised group. Only about one-third of them are actually citizens at any given moment, which means that two-thirds can't exercise political power through the ballot box. What's more, immigrants divided along linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines don't often think of themselves as a distinct class of people. Swartz began to change that by having local ethnic organizations talk to each other and coordinate political activity at the national level. Suddenly, thanks to Swartz, groups such as the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights and the San Francisco Southeast Asian Community Center found themselves having an increasingly unified voice inside the Beltway.

As more immigrants came to the United States--about 15 million have arrived legally since the forum's founding--the influence of the coalition grew. Allied organizations, such as the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the National Council of La Raza, made similar gains. In 1990, Swartz courted conservatives and business groups for the first time to work with left-wing groups in defeating restrictionist legislation. They succeeded, and this union of political opposites has more or less stayed together under Swartz's leadership.

Swartz became so accomplished at orchestrating odd-bedfellow alliances on immigration that he started trying to do the same on other issues, though with less success. In the early 1990s, he reached from right to left on the issue of the flat tax, trying to convince liberal ethnic organ-izations that their members could benefit from tax reform. He made some headway, but the flat tax issue fizzled. Immigration remained his bread-and-butter cause, as well as the one he cared about most deeply.

Swartz formally quit the forum in 1989 but continued to maintain a strong presence as an independent operator. His greatest moment came in 1996, when just about everybody was starting to think that the politics of Washington had turned sharply against immigration supporters. Two politicians in particular, Sen. Simpson and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), sensed an opportunity to curtail both legal and illegal immigration.

Following the Republican victories of 1994, Simpson and Smith took over the
immigration subcommittees in their respective chambers. Working together, they crafted a broad legislative package to combat illegal immigration that also would have lowered legal immigration by roughly one-third due to numerical reductions and regulatory restrictions. The pair figured that the unpopularity of illegal immigration and the perceived need to pass a bill--any bill--against it during an election year would encourage lawmakers to vote for the accompanying restrictions on legal immigrants. By the spring of 1996, it looked
like Simpson and Smith had the votes to win. The White House signaled its willingness to sign the bill into law.

But Simpson and Smith ultimately failed, thanks to Swartz and his allies, among them Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, an influential conservative with strong grassroots connections and a direct line to the Republican House leadership. The bill's opponents successfully urged Congress to split the legislation in half and deal separately with legal and illegal immigration. This tactical move allowed worried lawmakers to pass an anti-illegal alien bill that included, among other things, an expansion of the Border Patrol. At the same time, it prevented cuts in legal immigration because there was much less political will to tackle that subject.

"We nailed them," boasts Swartz, who worked strenuously to keep his business and ethnic-group coalition together. He convinced each side that neither was served by selling out the other in a deal with Simpson and Smith. Although no clear party lines developed in Congress, most Democrats came out of the debate looking like supporters of legal immigration and most Republicans, fatefully, emerged as apparent detractors.

Pro-immigration forces never have had a stronger lobby in Washington than right now. An increasingly influential and sophisticated coalition of ethnic groups work in sync with a business community that is more supportive of immigration today than it has been at any time since the first part of the century. What's more, the Republican Party, which lately has been the political vehicle for immigration restriction, is eager to make amends with Hispanics who have abandoned the GOP in droves in recent election cycles.

The business link has proved vital. Immigrants typically gain admission to the United States because they have relatives living here or because they have special skills to offer. The ethnic organizations generally favor the former category, while business supports the latter. Whenever the immigration debate heats up, the two sides talk to each other but privately worry they'll be sold out. The National Council of La Raza fears that the National Association of Manufacturers will agree to support restrictions on family immigration in order to preserve or expand business immigration. The converse is true as well. The pro-immigration victories in 1990 and 1996 would not have been possible without support from business groups. Both sides have stuck together, and it's proven to be a mutually beneficial strategy.

One of the newest partners in the pro-immigration alliance is high-tech industry. The story of Silicon Valley's political awakening has been told before: Five or six years ago, computer companies and the federal government seemed content to ignore each other. Today, the Justice Department's antitrust actions against Microsoft and Intel are front-page news around the country. In between, a series of issues has made high-tech companies concern themselves with politics. In 1995, they fought off federal securities legislation. In 1996, they helped defeat California's Proposition 211, which would have made shareholder suits easier to file. Encryption and Internet taxation are perennial concerns.

A key issue for Silicon Valley mirrors the Chamber of Commerce's labor shortage worry: There aren't enough highly skilled workers in the United States to fill all the jobs cutting-edge firms routinely create. According to the chamber, 58 percent of companies face a skilled worker shortage today, compared to 28 percent three years ago. Since 1990, American companies have been allowed to recruit foreign-born brainpower through the H1-B Visa Program, which permits 65,000 talented immigrants to enter the United States annually. In 1997, for the first time, all 65,000 were used before the year was over. This year, they were gone by May 7.

This summer, the Senate had agreed to a bill to raise this limit to 85,000 for the rest of this year, then to 95,000 in 1999, 105,000 in 2000, and 115,000 in 2001 and 2002, before returning to 65,000 in 2003. The Clinton administration threatened a veto in July because of protests from labor unions. A vote may occur in the fall but even if it doesn't, a similar piece of legislation appears inevitable next year. The pro-immigration ethnic groups basically have sat on the sidelines during the debate.

A final factor in the transformation of immigration politics involves the Republican Party's changing attitudes. Although there remains plenty of diversity within the ranks of the GOP, Republicans have shifted from a soft anti-immigrant stance in the early 1990s under the tutelage of Simpson and Smith to a striking reluctance today even to raise the subject. They essentially have returned to the old Reagan approach of praising legal immigrants and criticizing illegal aliens, even though this masks growing opposition to immigration among movement conservatives who didn't feel strongly about it during the 1980s.

The party's troubles began with the 1994 vote on California's Proposition 187, a ballot initiative aimed at denying a range of services, including public education and nonemergency medical care, to illegal aliens. That year, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, who has a knack for attaching himself to popular issues, wedded his uncertain re-election to the initiative. The referendum's great popularity--it passed with about 60 percent support--grew out of an understandable irritation at the fact that the federal government forced states and localities to pick up virtually all of the social service costs associated with illegal immigration. Many Californians did not think they should have to pay for expenses like schooling illegal immigrant children when the federal government, which is responsible for keeping illegal aliens out of the country in the first place, wasn't doing its job. In their minds, this was a huge unfunded mandate imposed from afar on California taxpayers.

Supporters of Prop. 187 weren't careful about distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants--a point many Democrats exploited. One TV ad promoting Wilson's re-election featured a grainy black-and-white image of Mexicans pouring across the border, with the voice-over: "They keep coming." Wilson won in November with 55 percent of the vote, but his victory came with a price: plummeting support for Republicans among Hispanics. Only 23 percent of Latinos cast ballots for Wilson--about the same as his draw among self-described Democrats, according to the Los Angeles Times exit poll.

Other GOPers fared much better among Hispanics in 1994. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, winning office for the first time, captured as much as 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in his state. But Wilson seemed the rule, Bush the exception. (This is also one of the reasons Bush is the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000--he's perceived as better able to cut into the Democrats' base of Hispanic support than any other Republican.)

Many Republicans nevertheless believed that adopting Wilson's political themes would serve them well. Wilson, after all, did win re-election. Then came the disastrous Simpson-Smith legislation, which failed to achieve much of anything apart from painting the GOP as unfriendly to the foreign-born. That same summer, the immigration debate popped up again in the context of welfare reform. Congress passed a law that contained provisions denying noncitizens access to food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, and federal cash support for the poor, elderly, and disabled. State governments also were given the authority to limit cash welfare, Medi-caid, and other forms of public assistance. Even though many Democrats opposed the bill, President Clinton signed it. At the signing ceremony, however, he promised to repeal many of the sections affecting immi- grants. Clinton thereby got credit both for achieving welfare reform and for defending immigrant rights shortly before his re-election. Congress, on the other hand, got credit for welfare reform and also blame for being anti-immigrant.

At the national level, Republicans paid a price for their failed attempt to cut immigration and their successful attempt to deny welfare to noncitizens. Hispanic voters flocked to the Democrats. In 1996, they gave 70 percent of their support to President Clinton, up from 55 percent in 1992. Republican candidate Bob Dole earned only
21 percent Hispanic sup-
port--a smaller share than any other GOPer on record. What's more, polling data suggest that the Democrats may have carried 85 percent of Hispanic voters who had just become citizens and that they also made deep inroads among the traditionally GOP-leaning Cubans in Florida.

EVER SINCE, THE Republican Party has engaged in a massive damage control operation. Political candidates in California have sprinted away from ballot propositions that allegedly run counter to the interests of the state's Hispanics. In 1998, Attorney General Dan Lungren, who is currently the GOP nominee for governor, publicly opposed Proposition 227, an initiative intending to eliminate bilingual education. (Other prominent California Republicans, such as Wilson and GOP Senate candidate Matt Fong, supported it.) Prop. 227, inspired by Latino immigrant parents in Los Angeles who boycotted a local public elementary school for not teaching their children in English, suggested an electorate more concerned about state-enforced multiculturalism than immigration levels. Polling sponsored by Ron K. Unz, a Republican who bankrolled the initiative, revealed that conservative anxieties about immigration would be substantially relaxed if the government didn't promote racial preference policies or bilingual education programs that refuse to teach kids in English.

Prop. 227 won with 61 percent of the vote in June. Most Latinos opposed it, despite pre-election surveys showing widespread sympathy for the cause. Lungren won only 17 percent of La-
tino votes in California's
June 2 gubernatorial open primary, compared to 43 percent of whites and 39 per-cent of Asians, according to
the Los Angeles Times exit
poll.

In Congress, Republicans have spent much of the last two years undoing their welfare law as it applies to immigrants. Noncitizens who were living in the United States at the time of the bill's passage are now allowed to retain most of the benefits Congress had stripped. (To Republicans' credit, those who weren't in the country at the time now find it more difficult to receive welfare than immigrants once did.) The upshot is a political disaster for the GOP: It spent an enormous amount of capital passing the restrictions, which are sensible from a public policy perspective. Then it repealed most of what it had done. So Republicans earned an anti-immigrant political tag and two years later do not have much to show for it--except for a bad reputation among Hispanics.

There's a grand tradition in American politics of attempting to win the immigrant vote--even bribing editors of ethnic newspapers not to run ads from opponents, as was done in the 1912 presidential race--but the GOP lately has succumbed to blatant pandering. Last year, Congress increased the annual appropriation earmarked for bilingual education to more than $300 million. Today, House Speaker Newt Gingrich gives serious consideration to the disastrous idea of Puerto Rican statehood, promises to settle the land claims of Mexican Americans who say their ancestors' property rights were violated under provisions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and regularly issues press releases in Spanish. (These releases, incidentally, often contain amusing grammatical errors. One, celebrating Cinco de Mayo, asserted that the holiday honoring Mexico's defeat of French invaders in 1862 resulted in "the right of the people to personality determination," instead of self-determination. Another referred to Gingrich as "Hablado," which is Spanish for windbag.)

This isn't to say that nobody tries to offend the immigration lobby anymore. Lamar Smith is sponsoring a modest naturalization bill meant to clean up citizenship fraud. Rep. Steve Horn (R-Calif.), reacting to evidence of illegal aliens' voting in 1996, wants voters to show identification before they cast election ballots. This proposal remains a legislative long shot, though it may yet find its way into a campaign finance reform package.

Few pro-immigrant groups, and none of those on the left, like these small-bore proposals. But having defeated recent attempts to cut admission levels, they can hardly complain about where they're sitting. One of their major concerns right now is to block Smith's effort to make elderly citizenship applicants have their fingerprints taken--something they're currently exempt from doing. "Many elderly applicants have arthritis and other conditions which make them time consuming, if not impossible, to fingerprint," complains one backgrounder on the Smith bill. That about sums up the gravitas of the immigration debate today: Should seniors trying to become citizens have their fingers stained with ink?

Big pieces of immigration legislation tend to come along every four to six years: 1980, 1986, 1990, 1996. It's too soon to expect another major package right now, and the first rumblings for one can't be heard anywhere on Capitol Hill. But with the economy humming and a pro-immigration political structure firmly in place in Washington, odds are immigration levels won't fall anytime soon. They may even go up--perhaps by a lot--in the next decade.

The 20th century helped define the United States as a nation of immigrants, even though relatively few came for nearly half of it. If today's patterns continue, the 21st century may find the United States calling itself a nation of permanent immigration. In the opening words to his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book The Uprooted, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin famously remarked, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." At the end of the 20th century, it looks like immigrants also may be the American future.

Bones of Contention

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Wed, 01 Oct 1997 00:00:00 EDT

When Dave Deacy and Will Thomas found a human skull in the shallows of the Columbia River in July 1996, they thought they had stumbled across the remains of a murder victim. So they hid the skull in some bushes and notified the police in Kennewick, Washington. That evening, Benton County Coroner Floyd Johnson called James Chatters, a local forensics specialist and the owner of Applied Paleoscience, a resource management firm in nearby Richland.

About a dozen times a year, a county coroner leads Chatters into the field to examine mysterious bones found by somebody who wasn't looking for them. The coroner wants to know if he will have to reopen an unsolved missing person case. At Kennewick, Chatters and Johnson recovered an almost complete skeleton in good condition. Little did either of them realize that this discovery would set off an important academic and legal debate over the prehistoric settling of America and the ownership of the past.

"The bones looked very fresh," says Chatters. "They had a nice yellow-brown color to them, and that's how contemporary bones would look." The fact that they were located on a river bank also argued for a fairly recent vintage, since most bones do not weather well in a muddy environment. But soil adhered to them, suggesting strongly that they did not belong to a newly deceased person. Still, they seemed no more than 200 years old.

Back at his lab, Chatters quickly profiled the remains. They belonged to a white man of average height and slender build, somewhere between the ages of 40 and 55. He had suffered several serious injuries, including compound fractures to at least six ribs. "I thought we had found an early European settler," says Chatters. One point nagged at him, however. An arrowhead lodged in the right side of the man's pelvis was of a type commonly used in the region thousands of years ago. It had not gone completely out of style by the 19th century, but it was rare. Chatters re-examined the skull and also showed the remains to a colleague, Catherine J. MacMillan, a retired physical anthropologist from Central Washington University. She concurred that the skeleton was Caucasoid. To satisfy any lingering doubts about the age, the coroner asked Chatters to order radiocarbon dating on a finger bone.

The stunning results came back a week later. Ever since, a startling question has buzzed around the academic world and occasionally spilled into the popular press:

What on earth was a white guy doing in the Pacific Northwest nearly 10,000 years ago?

Well, maybe not a white guy. It's a mistake to project modern racial categories onto the past, especially since this particular past is so long ago. Scientists have no way of knowing the color of Kennewick Man's skin--a point that Chatters and others have been careful to make from the start. But if they can't say with certainty that he was white, they can say he had a lot of traditionally Caucasoid features, as opposed to the Mongoloid ones characterizing most of today's Indians. His skull was long and his face was narrow and prognathic rather than broad and flat. And he lacked other features, such as shovel-shaped incisors, that are generally associated with Mongoloid people. Chatters recently said that Kennewick Man probably looked a lot like Patrick Stewart, the actor who played Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. "These remains are an absolutely priceless piece of the human record," says David Murray, an anthropologist at the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C.

But they may soon be gone. Only a few days after the dating tests came in, the federal government seized Kennewick Man and prevented scientists from conducting further research on him. For more than a year, the remains have been locked away in a repository.

What happened? The answer lies in a piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 1990. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was meant both to protect existing Indian burial sites from disinterment and to help tribes reclaim the remains of ancestors stored in museums. The difference between an archaeologist and a grave robber is often in the eye of the beholder. NAGPRA was supposed to create a set of rules to resolve conflicts between scientists who study dead Indians, and living Indians hoping to honor tribal customs. But it was never intended to stop anthropologists and archaeologists from conducting important research on ancient remains. Unfortunately, it has come very close to doing just that. "If we lose Kennewick Man, then every ancient skeleton in the United States could be lost to this law," says Richard Jantz, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tennessee.

When human remains are found on federal property--Kennewick Man was located in an area managed by the Army Corps of Engineers--NAGPRA requires the government to contact any tribes that may share a "cultural affiliation" with the bones. This bond is easy to establish when a grave includes funerary objects widely recognized as having been produced by a certain tribe. But not every case is so obvious. The older the remains, the harder it is to tie them to a modern tribe. And sometimes, as in the case of Kennewick Man, there are no clues apart from the bones themselves.

When uncertainties arise, tribes may claim the remains if they summon "geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion" in their favor. Such sweepingly vague language has made it extremely difficult to resolve several disputes to everyone's satisfaction. "There have been a lot of unintended consequences since the law was passed," says Phillip Walker, a physical anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The Army Corps of Engineers decided that Kennewick Man's age showed beyond any doubt that he was an Indian. It confiscated the remains from Chatters's office and notified several local tribes of their existence. Within a few days, five tribes petitioned under NAGPRA to have the remains repatriated for reburial, an act that would forever remove Kennewick Man from scientific study. "Our elders have taught us that once a body goes into the ground, it is meant to stay there until the end of time," wrote Armand Minthorn, a leader of the Umatilla tribe.

The corps almost immediately complied with the tribes' request, publishing its intention to hand over the remains and forbidding any scientist to look at them in the meantime. During a 30-day waiting period between the announcement and the actual repatriation, however, a group of eight prominent scientists sued the corps. They said that it had misinterpreted NAGPRA, that Kennewick Man represents a national treasure with no apparent tie to any of today's Indian tribes, and that they want the opportunity to conduct in-depth examinations. They filed their case against the government with no institutional backing, since none of their universities wants to get involved in a lawsuit that appears to pit a bunch of white men against Indians. Several professional organizations also have chosen to sit on the sidelines for similar reasons. The plaintiffs are thankful to have a lawyer pursuing their case for free.

In many such NAGPRA disputes, science clashes with an odd combination of religious fundamentalism and political bargaining. Many Indians--particularly the sort likely to become involved in tribal governments--have embraced a kind of anti-scientific spiritualism as a way of promoting group cohesion. "We have our own science and traditions," says Suzan Harjo, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Morning Star Foundation and a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. "What the archaeologists call evidence is usually based on what one person thinks might have happened," she adds. "It's such a Eurocentric point of view." The Umatillas' Minthorn feels the same way. "From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time," he says. "We do not believe that our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do."

Politics has also played a role. The scientists' Portland, Oregon-based lawyer, Alan L. Schneider, likes to point out that the Army Corps of Engineers is not a disinterested party in NAGPRA discussions. "They have a lot of ongoing dealings with all the tribes in the area," he says. The corps regularly negotiates salmon fishing rights with the Indian tribes claiming Kennewick Man, for instance. Schneider uncovered a revealing internal memo during discovery: "All risk to us seems to be associated with not repatriating the remains," it reads. In other words, the corps has privately acknowledged its strong political incentive to make good on the Indians' NAGPRA claim because doing otherwise would complicate its relationship with them.

The scientists would like the corps to take a longer view. "This is an incredibly important find," says Jantz, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. "There are maybe a dozen skeletons of this age that we know about. Each new discovery represents a significant increase in the amount of information available about the peopling of America."

Kennewick Man appears to challenge the conventional academic belief that North and South America were settled 10,000 years ago by Asian people crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower than they are now, making such a passage possible. Yet the more scientists learn about ancient human migrations, the less predictable they become. Perhaps other types of people crossed this land bridge as well.

Archaeologists working in the Tarim Basin of western China recently uncovered more than 100 mummies that are several thousand years old. Many of these desiccated corpses are in such good condition that their fair skin and blonde hair is still visible. What were they doing in the middle of Asia? The Ainu people of Japan, a long-oppressed minority population, have an even more baffling heritage. Native to Japan before Mongoloid people settled on the island, they are known for their distinctly un-Japanese physical traits, such as light skin and wavy hair. In fact, they look a lot like Europeans. But nobody knows how to explain their presence so far away from Europe. Kennewick Man suggests that similar mysteries may lie hidden in the United States.

Other researchers are examining the possibility that some ancient Europeans made their way to the Americas the way the Vikings did before Columbus: by hopping from northern Europe to Iceland, to Greenland, and finally to Canada. The evidence for this is still highly conjectural. It hinges mainly on some intriguing technological similarities between ancient cultures in America and Europe.

Questions such as these won't be resolved if anthropologists and archaeologists cannot study ancient sites and remains found in the United States. And NAGPRA's vagueness about what constitutes a legitimate tribal claim gives federal agencies a license to disrupt that work. In the case of Kennewick Man, it's impossible for any modern tribe to demonstrate a connection with the remains, especially without further study. "Once you get beyond a certain age, it's extremely hard for a living tribe to make a claim," says University of Arizona geologist C. Vance Haynes Jr., who joined the lawsuit. The Army Corps of Engineers has simply assumed that since the bones are incredibly old, they must be related to tribes inhabiting the region today--as if nobody has moved in or out of the area for more than 9,000 years.

Kennewick Man is not the first case in which government regulations have prevented scientists from researching ancient finds. The Spirit Cave Mummy discovered in Nevada in 1940 was once thought to be only 2,000 years old because of its excellent preservation, but recent radiocarbon dating has suggested an age of 9,400 years. It, too, has several Caucasoid features. But earlier this year the Northern Paiute tribe claimed it under NAGPRA, and since then the Bureau of Land Management has prevented the Nevada State Museum from conducting genetics tests on the remains until it makes a ruling on ownership. Four years ago, a state law forced researchers to give a skeleton found near Buhl, Idaho, to the Shoshone-Bannock tribe for reburial. The remains may have had Caucasoid features and were dated at roughly 10,600 years, making them among the oldest ever found in the Americas. But little is known about them today, since they were quickly turned over to the tribe.

Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University and one of the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man case, had a troubling run-in with NAGPRA several years ago. While investigating a Montana site that is at least 11,000 years old, he came across several strands of ancient human hair. When he went public with the find in 1993, two local tribes claimed the hair as the remains of their ancestors and demanded that Bonnichsen turn it over to them. The BLM prevented researchers from continuing their work at the site and barred them from analyzing the hair they had collected. Bonnichsen pleaded that there is a big difference between disturbing the buried remains of recent ancestors and studying hair that was almost certainly shed naturally very long ago. After a drawn-out battle, NAGPRA regulations were altered to allow the study of naturally shed hair, but Bonnichsen still has not received permission to conduct the chemical and genetic analysis he had planned.

NAGPRA comes at a particularly inopportune moment. Recent technological advances allow researchers to obtain revolutionary new insights about ancient people. In July, German geneticists determined through mitochondrial DNA analysis that Neanderthals are probably not ancestors of modern humans. Such infor-

mation would have been impossible to gather only a few years ago, and researchers would like to conduct similar experiments on Kennewick Man to learn more about his relationship to modern people. They would also like to reconfirm his age, obtain a more comprehensive set of skeletal measurements, and search for other clues about life in the past.

These sorts of investigation are routinely performed elsewhere, but the scientists' opponents would have the world believe that this is simply another morality play between treaty-breaking whites and reservation-bound Indians. "It comes down to racism," says Harjo. The implication is that whites would never think of exhuming the remains of their own ancestors. But nothing could be further from the truth. One plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Smithsonian Institution's Douglas Owsley, is studying bones recently discovered at Jamestown, England's first successful colony in North America. Other researchers have learned an enormous amount about prehistoric Europe by examining the 5,300-year-old "Ice Man" found in the Alps in 1991. Last year, a Danish museum sponsored a big exhibit of the so-called Bog People--corpses preserved in the peat swamps of northern Europe for thousands of years. If something like NAGPRA had applied to these remains, they would never have become important sources of information about the past. They would be in the ground, decomposing.

In July, the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man standoff received some good news. A federal judge, finding that the Army Corps of Engineers had acted capriciously last year in its hasty decision to repatriate the bones, ordered the corps to reassess its decision. A few days later, Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) inserted language into an Appropriations Committee report saying that "it is in the public interest that information providing greater insight into American prehistory should be collected, preserved, and disseminated for the benefit of the country as a whole" and urging the corps to "act as an impartial party" in the dispute.

The tribes may still get Kennewick Man, but now a judge has imposed a tougher standard on their claim and some political pressure has come to bear on the corps. The bones still sit in a government vault, and the case is likely to grind on for at least a few more months. "I think Kennewick Man has been a good thing if only because it has focused so much attention on this problem," says Jantz. "It just has to have a happy ending."

Contract Killers

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Sat, 01 Feb 1997 00:00:00 EST

When they aren't interviewing celebrities or inserting explosives underneath pick-up trucks, television news programs occasionally affect public policy. Last July, ABC News's 20/20 aired a segment called "Selling Out America," which focused on corrupt naturalization proceedings. "Would you believe that some private companies are helping immigrants cheat on the citizenship test?" asked Barbara Walters as she introduced the topic. By September, Congress had convened hearings on the matter. Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) said "serious instances of testing fraud in the citizenship process" had become common. His main witness: a woman featured on 20/20. Throughout October, Republicans charged the Clinton administration with coercing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to produce record numbers of new citizens (read: likely Democratic voters) by tolerating the type of illegal behavior that 20/20 had exposed.

20/20 was onto something. The INS has invited an undue amount of fraudulence into the naturalization process. And although the mini-uproar over citizenship may have done some good, it has also sacrificed a surprising and innocent victim: privatization.

First, a little background. More immigrants are becoming citizens today than ever before. Roughly 1 million of them are expected to have naturalized by the end of 1996, up from an average of about 210,000 per year during the 1980s. Why the fivefold increase? Conventional wisdom says the country's newly harsh attitude toward immigrants has inspired most of the interest. Congress just passed a new welfare law that severely restricts non-citizens' access to public assistance. It also concluded an occasionally nasty debate on the utility of immigrants in general, featuring a number of prominent Republicans who painted even legal newcomers as shiftless ne'er- do-wells. Two years earlier, California voters approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative designed to deny a series of public services to illegal aliens (implementation of which has since been blocked by the courts). To escape persecution, say the pundits, immigrants are seeking sanctuary in citizenship. They fear that the political sentiments driving Prop. 187 may snowball into attacks on legal permanent residents.

There is a fair amount of truth to this interpretation. Frightened by recent laws and ballot initiatives, many immigrants have no doubt sought citizenship when they might not otherwise have done so.

But there is more to the story. Applications for citizenship started rising in 1992, before immigrants became anybody's favorite scapegoat. In fact, the INS minted more citizens in 1993 than in any previous year, breaking a record set in 1944. Applications climbed slightly higher still in 1994, and many of them were made long before the Prop. 187 campaign became general knowledge in California, let alone around the country. In other words, the rush to citizenship started before the GOP-controlled Congress said its first word about immigrants.

The boom in naturalization includes three important sources that have nothing to do with recent anti-immigrant sentiments. First, the pool of eligible citizenship applicants has increased. Between 1981 and 1987, as the Center for Immigration Studies has pointed out, the United States admitted about 581,000 immigrants per year. Over the next seven years, however, admissions jumped by 47 percent to 853,000 per year (this figure includes both legal immigrants and illegal immigrants granted amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act). The calculation is simple: More legal aliens equals more potential citizens. Second, two years ago the INS ordered permanent legal residents holding green cards issued before 1979 to have them renewed--for a fee of $75. Applying for citizenship, on the other hand, costs only $95. So thousands of non-citizens decided to lay out the extra money and seize the opportunity to naturalize. Finally, the Mexican government may revise its constitution to allow Mexican nationals who become citizens of other countries to retain certain property rights that they currently forfeit. Although this change has not yet occurred, mere talk of it encourages Mexican immigrants--who have very low naturalization rates--to apply for citizenship, with the hope that during the wait to become an American citizen, Mexico's policy will change.

Whatever the ultimate cause of the rise in citizenship applications, the sheer volume quickly created a dilemma for the INS. How should it deal with so many applicants at once? Naturalization, after all, is a complicated process that makes many demands upon the agency conferring it. The INS must conduct an FBI criminal background check of every naturalization applicant to guarantee that they have not been convicted of a felony. During a one-on-one interview, an INS agent must ensure that would-be citizens can speak, read, and write in simple English. Agents must also give a test in which the immigrants demonstrate a basic understanding of U.S. history and government. There are other requirements, too. Added together, it takes about 15 minutes to interview each citizenship candidate and either accept or reject the petition. When hundreds of thousands of people are waiting in line, those minutes add up.

If a private business were confronted with this problem, it might choose to out-source the work--in other words, pay someone else to do it. The public sector does not often think in these terms, so when it does it should receive praise. And, in fact, this is what the INS smartly did. Recognizing that the test on U.S. history and government took up a chunk of agents' interview time, it searched for ways to cut down on this commitment. It decided to contract with six private companies to offer the naturalization testing. Immigrants can still take the test in an INS office, but they do not have to. Those who pass one of these out-sourced tests are granted waivers exempting them from taking the exam with an agent. Agents, in turn, are able to conduct more interviews over the course of a day. Although the INS does not keep numbers, informal estimates from INS officials indicate as many as 20 percent of all citizenship applicants now use these waivers.

When done correctly, the contract testing works like an SAT exam. A bunch of very serious, very anxious people come together for the test, which is mercilessly administered by frowning proctors who check identification at the door, read the directions no more than twice, and insist that everybody keep quiet. The test takers leave without knowing for certain how well they have done. Weeks later, their scores arrive in the mail.

Many immigrants are eager to take these tests, which they pay for themselves (prices vary widely, from $25 to more than $100). They are often provided as part of a package deal that includes professional advice on how to fill out maddeningly complex citizenship applications, a set of fingerprints, and a pair of photographs (both required for the application).

Perhaps more important, if immigrants fail one of these exams, they can try again and hope for a better performance next time. Failure in an INS office, on the other hand, usually results in long delays or a complete rejection. Many immigrants also say that they prefer to get the test out of the way before they arrive for their formal interview because visiting an INS office is a nerve- wracking experience not conducive to passing an exam. Suffice it to say that INS bureaucrats do not have a stellar reputation among the foreign-born.

Unfortunately, this privatized testing is full of corruption (though INS testing is not without its problems). When The New York Times in 1994 called the INS "broadly dysfunctional" and "perhaps the most troubled major agency in the federal government," it wasn't joking. The six companies that have contracted with the INS to conduct the tests parcel out the actual job of giving the citizenship exams to hundreds of subcontractors around the country, who send the completed tests into their parent company for grading. Many of these subcontractors are the adult education branches of public schools. Non-profit organizations are also active participants, as are individual for-profit entrepreneurs. The vast majority are honest providers.

But many are not. The problem is that the INS has done virtually nothing to oversee the practices of the contractors or subcontractors. In other words, it has no quality-control mechanism to prevent the buying and selling of answers. This has invited plenty of hucksters into the INS's privatization program. It is impossible to know the precise extent of the problem, except to note that almost everybody close to the process is suspicious of it. Many of the INS agents detailed to naturalization say they do not trust the waivers awarded by the private companies because they have seen people who do not speak a word of English walk into their offices carrying them. 20/20's investigation of a Dallas-based subcontractor showed, via hidden camera, how an exam proctor would walk around a room of test takers and correct their mistakes. "This threatens my livelihood," said Greg Gourley, a Seattle-based entrepreneur who offers a variety of naturalization- related services. "The system is wide open to payoffs. Somebody has to clean up what's going on."

So what lesson did 20/20 draw from this evidence? Answer: Privatization is bad. "Some people [are] making a mockery of the whole citizenship process," said correspondent Brian Ross, "particularly since the federal government a few years ago quietly permitted key parts of the testing process, once conducted exclusively by federal inspectors, to also be run by outside groups, including for-profit businesses." What could be worse? Not much, according to Ross, who wasted little time before returning to his theme of public-sector virtue versus private-sector corruption. Contract testing is "a booming multi-million dollar business," he said, "plagued by blatant cheating and fraud...by people making money giving the test."

To be sure, Ross got all the details right. In fact, his investigation should win an award for fine reporting. Unfortunately, 20/20 got the big picture wrong. The problem isn't that some people are earning a living by conducting citizenship tests for the INS--a category, which, after all, includes INS agents along with private testers. Rather, it's that the INS has not followed through on its privatization efforts.

It has made virtually no effort to ensure that the private companies providing the tests (and their subcontractors) are not also selling answers. Without such reasonable guarantees, contract testing cannot work. Some INS agents in places like Arlington, Virginia, and Spokane, Washington, have even started rejecting waivers entirely and making applicants take the in-house test instead, a de facto reversal of the INS's privatization efforts. In November, the INS actually terminated its relationship with one of its six contractors, the Florida-based Naturalization Assistance Service. This action grew out of 20/20's exposé. There are currently no signs that the INS will eliminate the entire privatization program, but the other five main providers are wary.

There are, however, a few simple steps the INS could take to salvage a program that, for the most part, makes the difficult citizenship process run more smoothly and efficiently, for agents and applicants alike. For starters, the INS could monitor the testing. "Auditors, random site inspections, even undercover operations--these are the most obvious ways to improve performance," says William D. Eggers, director of the Reason Foundation's Privatization Center.

Other, less costly steps might also work. Subcontractors could submit themselves to the same FBI background check that naturalization applicants must pass. This would weed out people who have been convicted of felonies. The INS could insist that all testing times and sites be publicly announced several weeks in advance. This would shine light onto a business that often goes on behind closed doors. Finally, INS agents across the country could be instructed to look carefully at the names of subcontractors appearing on the exam waivers. Department stores routinely post lists of people who write bad checks next to their cash registers. Perhaps agents could be told to pay more attention to who is granting waivers, and to become familiar with which ones seem to have a solid record of producing well-prepared citizenship candidates, and which do not.

Without such measures, the INS will have no choice but to pull the plug on privatization. It might wind up doing what 20/20 did--blaming the profit motive as the reason its privatization experiment did not work. The real reason would be because the agency could not get its act together. But in the meantime, an innovative idea that has helped thousands become American citizens and the INS to become more efficient will suffer.

Migration Patterns

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Wed, 01 May 1996 00:00:00 EDT

Migrations and Cultures: A World View, by Thomas Sowell, New York: Basic Books, 512 pages, $27.50

Thomas Sowell has spent much of his professional life advancing a controversial idea: There's more to inequality than discrimination. In his latest book,Migrations and Cultures: A World View, Sowell forges ahead, drawing lessons from the experiences of German, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, and Indian migrants. "[O]ne of the clearest facts to emerge from these worldwide histories of various racial and ethnic groups is that gross statistical disparities in the 'representation' of groups in different occupations, industries, income levels, and educational institutions have been the rule--not the exception--all across the planet," he writes. "Moreover, many of these disparities have persisted for generations or even centuries."

This is, needless to say, not the dominant view of the American Sociological Association, or of social scientists generally. When they encounter disparities between racial, ethnic, or cultural groups, their first and last impulse is to call a hunt for modern-day oppressors. "[T]he political temptation is to overlook the causal influences of differences in cultural capital which often go far back into history and, instead, to attribute these disparities to current failures of society," writes Sowell. That's a big mistake, since "skills have never been evenly or randomly distributed, whether between ethnic groups, nations, regions, or civilizations."

The problem is cultural relativism-- the idea that no culture is better than any other culture, despite their apparent differences. Many academics today are relativists. Sowell is not. He understands that culture is more than the stuff of a university's multicultural festival, where all the food is good and all the games are fun. His view of culture is more complex, and also more functional. "Cultures are the particular ways of accomplishing the things that make life possible," writes Sowell. These include methods of arranging families, transmitting knowledge, and organizing politics, as well as the values that cultures attach to matters like spirituality, intellect, violence, cleanliness, and technology.

OK, so maybe cultures are not equal. But how can we compare them? That's easy, says Sowell: They compete. "Cultures do not exist as simply static 'differences' to be celebrated but compete with one another as better and worse ways of getting things done--better and worse, not from the standpoint of some observer, but from the standpoint of the peoples themselves," writes Sowell.

Successful cultures will spread. Before the advent of mass communication, migrations were the primary means of expanding a culture's influence. When people moved, they took their knowledge with them. "[E]ach group has its own cultural pattern...these patterns do not disappear upon crossing a border or an ocean," writes Sowell. This is what accounts for so much of the occupational segregation we see around the world--and it is often better understood as cultural segregation. Sowell's six case studies provide dozens of examples of one cultural group coming to dominate an entire profession. Germans, for instance, have excelled in many different societies as clockmakers, piano builders, and brewers. This is not because they have been forced into ethnic niches, but because traditionally they have been very good at these jobs.

If Sowell's entire argument rested on German clockmakers, piano builders, and brewers, of course, he would have a very thin argument--and a thin book. But he provides scores of similar examples. Sometimes Migrations and Cultures reads like a compendium of odd statistics, a really long version of the Harper's "Index." Number of Japanese-owned barbershops in Lima, Peru in 1904: 1. Number in 1924: 130. Percent of all barbershops in Lima owned by Japanese in 1924: Almost three-quarters. Rate of home ownership among Sicilian immigrants to Australia: More than 80 percent. Percent of newspapers in Alexandria, Egypt, owned by Sy rians in the early 19th century: Over half. This sort of thing can go on for pages in mind-numbing fashion. Yet the sheer magnitude of these references drives home Sowell's thesis.

Sowell is emphatic in making the point that cultural differences do not equ al racial (i.e., genetic) differences, even though certain races are often closely associated with certain cultures. "Over long spans of history, the radical reshuffling of the relative technological rankings of different races and nations makes it hard to conclude that such standings are genetically determined," he writes. During the Middle Ages, Southern and Eastern Europe was much more advanced than Northern and Western Europe. But by the time of the Enlightenment, their positions had started to reverse.

Chinese migrants provide a similar example of a culture in flux. During the 20th century, the Chinese "have prospered all around the world--except in China." In fact, the overseas Chinese produced as much wealth in 1994 as the entire population of mainland China, which is many times larger. This has not always been the case. Less than one thousand years ago, China was arguably the most advanced civilization on the planet. But today, Chinese political institutions and economic practices inhibit entrepreneu rial growth.

In other places, most notably Indochina and increasingly in North America, the Chinese have succeeded remarkably as what Sowell calls "middleman minorities." Middlemen may have a lousy reputation, but they perform the useful service of lowering the cost of economic transactions. This can lead to many small successes, as individuals struggle to open stores in Singapore or Malaysia so they can support themselves and their families. It can also lead to stunning achievement. There are currently fi ve billionaires in Indonesia and Thailand, and each is of Chinese ancestry. Some commentators have started referring to the "Bamboo Network" of overseas Chinese who have invigorated Southeast Asian economies and are making dramatic progress in mainland Chi na itself as communist dictators grudgingly open markets to outside investment.

Sowell's thoughts on middlemen minorities are some of the most interesting in Migrations and Cultures. They are al-so some of the most aggravating, since we've heard them before--mainly from Sowell. In 1994's Race and Culture: A World View (which is ostensibly a companion to the current volume), Sowell also includes a section on middleman minorities. The two discussions do not overlap precisely and the anecdotes are mostly different, but veterans of the first book occasionally will experience a sense of d'jevu when reading the new one.

Geography also helps explain differences in how cultures have accumulated human capital. Coastal peoples have tended to be more knowledgeable, t echnologically and socially, than interior people, for example. Rivers can play a similar role, opening up the interior of a country to the outside world. One of the reasons why Africa is the world's least urbanized continent is not because its people are mentally deficient--a common if unspoken view--but because it has so few navigable rivers or natural harbors. In other words, Africans have not had the same kind of geographical advantages that have allowed other peoples to progress more rapidly.

Sowell do es not directly tackle the question of what generic qualities make a culture economically successful. Perhaps this is too ambitious a task for anybody --much smarter to cite specific examples of success and try to learn from them, rather than concoct grand theories that have no basis in reality. Still, it's hard not to make at least two general observations.

First, each of Sowell's groups dis-plays a commitment to the work ethic, or at least to some of the traits linked to it: "The capacity of Germans for hard, thorough, unrelenting work has been noted in Germany itself, as well as in colonial America, czarist Russia, Honduras, Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Argentina, and Paraguay." "The Japanese as a group acquired a reputation for honesty and reliability, w hether in Brazil, the United States, or Peru." Jews and Indians are both described as scrappy people of commerce who will toil away as peddlers and invest heavily in the education of their children. At one point, Sowell suggests that we should stop referri ng to the haves and have-nots and take up the "more fruitful dichotomy" of doers and do-nots.

Second, political activism delays economic success, since its emphasis on redistribution does not lead to a culture's formation of human capital. Better that migrants spend their time running their business than running for office. When they do run for off ice, they can rarely count on their ethnicity to get them far. When Fiorello H. La Guardia--the Italian American who represented New York in Congress and then served as mayor-- ran for mayor in a 1941 re-election, he defeated an Irish opponent but did not carry the city's significant Italian vote. Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is the descendent of Japanese migrants, but he needs more than their support to win elections. His popularity transcends his background.

Sowell does not talk much about Asian-American political behavior, but he might have. On a series of economic indicators, Asian Americans outperform every other racial or ethnic group in the United States, including non-Hispanic whites. They are also the least likely to vote. The most successful Asian-American politicians, such as California state treasurer Matt Fong, Rep. Jay Kim (R-Calif.), and Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Calif.), do not rely exclusively on an ethnic constituency--unlike most black or Hispanic lawmakers. They campaign as candidates, not race-men.

Ultimately, Migrations and Cultures shows that the view from the ivory tower, in which all cultures are equal and discrimination always explains dis parity, is wrong. To deny the fact of cultural competition--and that there are sometimes clear winners--is to engage in what Sowell condemns as "a polite evasion of otherwise embarrassing differences in performance" and "a distraction from the task of acquiring the requisite human capital behind other people's good fortune."

Wretched Refuse

info@reason.com (John J. Miller) — Thu, 01 Jun 1995 00:00:00 EDT

Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, by Peter Brimelow, New York: Random House, 329 pages, $23.00

Peter Brimelow never comes right out and says it, but he clearly thinks that today's immigrants threaten America's future more than southern secession, the Great Depression, or the Cold War ever did. "America has never faced a greater challenge," he claims in Alien Nation. Indeed, the very first sentence of this scaremongering book outlandishly invokes the image of goose-stepping Nazis: "Current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge on America," writes Brimelow. He never really explains why this is so, but that's fairly typical for this disappointing book of half-explanations and half-truths.

It had promised to be so much more. As a writer for Forbes, Brimelow for years has deservedly earned high marks for his reporting on the environment, regulation, and other issues. His exposés on teacher unions are classic. So when he penned an issue-length essay for National Review in 1992 arguing to cut back on immigration, Brimelow was taken very seriously by the free-market conservatives who intuitively oppose such measures. He set off a fierce debate on the right and quickly became a standard-bearer for anti-immigrant forces. Alien Nation is ostensibly a set of marching orders, a book that could do for immigration what Dinesh D'Souza did for political correctness or what David Brock did for Anita Hill.

It won't. Alien Nation spends so much time blaming so many things on immigrants that it rarely bothers to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on one matter at a time. To Brimelow, just about every aspect of the current wave of immigrants represents an unmitigated tragedy for the United States. Today's newcomers, he argues, fracture American culture. They hurt the environment. They bring diseases. They have the curious habit of both stealing jobs from Americans and going on the dole. Pick a problem--any problem--and somewhere in this book Brimelow will find a way to blame it on immigrants.

This tendentious fault finding pervades Alien Nation. Consider, for example, how Brimelow cites the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute's 1990 poll of leading economists. In this survey, 80 percent concluded that the United States has profited from 20th-century immigration and another two-thirds thought that increased immigration would boost U.S. living standards. Brimelow's spin: "[I]mmigration is a subject that much of the American elite gets emotional about" and "economists are part of the elite benefiting at the expense of their fellow Americans." Both of these points may be absolutely true, but they hardly negate the opinions of a group that included James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and John Kenneth Galbraith.

To engage its topic seriously, Alien Nation would have to dispense with its ad hominem cynicism and deliver a full-blown discussion of the good, bad, and unquantifiable impacts of immigrants on our economy, culture, and society. It never does. Like a kid with a short attention span, it's too eager to rush off for more fun somewhere else. The book's arguments mimic a blunderbuss as they blast scattershot in a dozen different directions at once; most miss their targets entirely or just fizzle into failure.

Brimelow fritters away far too many pages discussing how he came to write his book, comparing himself to Thomas Paine, and revealing his astrological sign (he's a Libra). He also relates many irrelevant details about the personal lives of other people, especially pro-immigrant economist Julian Simon. (Brimelow refers to Simon's odd sleeping and working habits, talks about how Simon went through a long period of severe depression and contemplated suicide, etc.) These details tell us nothing about immigration, which Brimelow is ostensibly writing about. Brimelow tries to cast Simon as a slightly odd person, which in turn is supposed to detract from his pro-immigration views. It's strictly ad hominem stuff, and rather repugnant. Upon finishing the last page, with its allusions to flying pigs and the French Revolution, one conclusion is certain: Alien Nation isn't a struggle to think through, it's a struggle to get through.

Perhaps the worst thing immigrants do is fuel Brimelow's feverish prose. "The nearest thing to a precedent" for today's influx, he argues, is the 5th-century Roman empire, which was overrun by Vandals, Visigoths, and other assorted villains. Yet we moderns actually have it much worse than the Romans ever did: "[T]he Germans were Western Europeans. They were virtually identical to the populations they conquered and with whom, in most cases, they proceeded quickly to merge." Americans should be so lucky! The dusky hordes of Mexico won't go nearly as easy on us. (The Huns, by the way, weren't exactly "Western Europeans.")

This sentiment--white barbarian armies aren't as bad as nonwhite migrants--highlights the unsettling racialist vision underscoring Alien Nation. America, says Brimelow, has a "specific ethnic core" of "white" people. What he seems to forget is that this supposed core is actually made up of many ethnicities. They may seem more or less alike today (don't tell my Irish-American father-in-law!), but only by way of a certain historical blindness.

When boatloads of Greek, Italian, and Jewish people arrived on American shores around the turn of the century, they didn't all embrace each other like long-lost cousins. They came from Europe, a place where there are no "whites"--only Bulgarians, Norwegians, Spaniards, Welsh, etc. They viewed themselves as profoundly different from one another, as well as from the largely Anglo native population. Most had very mixed feelings about assimilation, and they struggled both to cling to their old ways and to adapt in a new land. What their descendants share today is a culture distilled mainly from the British Isles, but with distinctly American peculiarities.

Today's newcomers may seem as strange to us as many of our grandparents did to Woodrow Wilson, who once accused "hyphenated Americans" of divided national loyalties. About 85 percent of immigrants to the United States over the past 25 years have come from nontraditional source countries in Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. To Brimelow, this remarkable diversity of people boils down to a simple "Us vs. Them" equation. Immigrants from such disparate places as Korea, Haiti, and Guatemala all hail from "one area," namely, the "Third World."

For Brimelow, they are people like Colin Ferguson, the Jamaican-born madman who opened fire on a crowded Long Island Rail Road train in 1993. Ferguson is an archetype, argues Brimelow, an immigrant everyman. His "particularly instructive" case raises the question "in any rational mind" of whether it's "really wise to allow the immigration of people who find it so difficult and painful to assimilate into the American majority."

Follow that reasoning? It goes something like this: Colin Ferguson is an immigrant. Colin Ferguson is bad. Therefore, all immigrants are bad.

There was a time when they weren't all bad, Brimelow admits. "Let's be clear about this: the American experience with immigration has been a triumphant success," he writes. But he's disturbingly clear about something else, too: "Then, immigrants came overwhelmingly from Europe, no matter how different they seemed at the time; now, immigrants are overwhelmingly visible minorities from the Third World."

This sounds very much like the anti-immigrant rhetoric of roughly 80 years ago, when Southern and Eastern Europeans were also "visible minorities." It doesn't take much effort to track down hysterical quotations from respected public figures panicking over how Hungarians would deracinate America. Many scholars used to split Europeans into three different groups: Nordics (best), Alpines (so-so), and Mediterraneans (wretched). Today we can laugh at this pigeonholing. But these ideas undergird the 1924 National Origins Quota system, which made it very hard for immigrants from anywhere outside Northern Europe to gain admission to the United States. This law essentially shut off the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, whose numbers peaked in 1907. It remained more or less in place until 1965, when racism became unfashionable and Congress overhauled immigration policy.

As a direct result of these reforms, Brimelow argues, the United States is headed toward "dissolution." If current trends continue, he prophesies, the country will divide into Quebec-like enclaves based on race and ethnicity: "[A]n Anglo-Cuban society like Greater Miami is going to have little in common with an Anglo-black society like Atlanta or even an Anglo-Mexican society like San Antonio. These will be communities as different from one another as any in the civilized world. They will verge on being separate nations."

But Brimelow's scare scenarios are neither particularly plausible nor particularly frightening. For a preview of our nightmarish future, for instance, Alien Nation turns to contemporary British Columbia. It seems that in Vancouver, "wealthy Chinese families are buying choice Victorian houses in wooded residential areas" and cutting down all the trees. They apparently do this because a Chinese superstition says that evil spirits live in the trees, writes Brimelow. Whatever the reason, "This behavior is deeply shocking to Vancouver standards." It represents "a genuine conflict of values....And it would not have happened without immigration." (Brimelow learned about this grave situation, incidentally, from participating in "a radio-call-in show.")

There's much more at stake with assimilation than suburban plant life, of course. The rise of multicultural and bilingual education is a distressing sign. Group entitlements can't peacefully coexist for long with individual rights. Despite the best efforts by the government to promote divisiveness through its public policies, however, today's newcomers give plenty of reasons to have faith in their assimilative capacity. Intermarriage rates are high. One-third of U.S.-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, and similar rates prevail among Asians. They're having lots of kids. More than 1.5 million children have one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic parent. In 1989, there were over one-third more births to exogamous Japanese/white couples than there were to endogamous-Japanese couples.

Demographers regularly remind us that the United States will become a "majority-minority" nation in the next century. But our concepts of race and ethnicity won't fit for much longer into the neat little boxes devised by Census bureaucrats. They will implode under the mounting pressure of Americans claiming unique combinations of ancestors from places such as Cambodia, El Salvador, and Senegal. Just as the Croatians, Czechs, and Poles of the early 1900s eventually broadened our notions of pluralism and identity, so will today's newcomers. According to a poll taken last year by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, many immigrants already feel like they're fitting in. When asked with which racial or ethnic group they shared most in common, both Asians and Hispanics picked whites--"the American majority" whose erosion so worries Brimelow.

Complete assimilation might take a couple of generations, it might seem to stall from time to time, and it will surely come with plenty of rough spots. But it will happen, just as it always has. By the time 2050 rolls around, today's furor over immigration will seem like nothing more than another episode in the long series of fusses Americans have had over every group of strangers at our gate. If we're still using terms like "majority-minority," they will probably mean something entirely different and unexpected.

Instead of grappling with these issues, however, Brimelow fantasizes about "America's white heartland" in the "intermountain West" and even "the Pacific Northwest going off with an independent British Columbia and Alberta." His belief that multiracial and multiethnic societies cannot work eventually turns into demands for ending immigration entirely, pleas for a national identity card, and pitches for restrictionist groups like the Carrying Capacity Network, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Negative Population Growth.

We've seen declinist anxieties over immigration come and go before. Brimelow simply trumpets their arrival once again, parroting much of what's been said in the past and occasionally updating it for the 1990s. Even if immigration enthusiasts have not always won their political fights, they can at least take comfort in knowing that history has typically vindicated their thinking. Immigration to the United States has been, to borrow Brimelow's phrase, "a triumphant success." It remains so today. And there's no reason to impose a moratorium on our optimism about it now.